Whether in the palace or the on the beach, the Queen of France glitters all the same, though with the addition of a ball that perhaps symbolizes victory. Despite the different costume, Marie (Caster) retains several core properties of her original version - most notably, her tankiness. Coming with a 3-hit Invincibility skill as well as self-heal, Marie is among the tankier Casters. She boasts a kit revolving around supporting critical-oriented allies, being able to increase allies’ critical star generation, generate some stars every turn, and even buff their critical damage.

On the other hand, being highly support-oriented means that Marie has less buffs for herself. Due to her low star weight, she can hardly make use of the critical stars she generates. With only a single attack buff and her passive Arts buff, her overall damage potential is rather low, especially considering the Caster-class 0.9x damage modifier.

Strengths

Good Critical Support

Marie provides additional critical stars (both through her Male-exclusive buff and her star generation skill), as well as a critical damage buff on her NP. Additionally, outside of her critical niche, her triple Arts card deck and attack buff can help her allies to generate more NP charge via Arts Chains and do more damage. These qualities make Marie a good critical support choice.

High Survivability

With a 3-hit Invincibility skill as well as self-heal at Marie’s beck and call, she is easily one of the most sturdy Servants in the game. These skills allow her to fully support her teammates from relative safety. Additionally, her NP’s critical chance down debuff helps reduce the amount of stray criticals from affected enemies.

Weaknesses

Low Damage Potential

With only a single attack buff, Marie’s NP damage is one of the lowest even among her Caster counterparts. With her low star weight and triple Arts deck, her normal cards also hit for modest amounts of damage, meaning that she should focus more on supporting her allies.

Lacks Party Sustain

Although Marie is able to sustain herself fairly well, she has nothing which helps her allies’ survivability aside from the situational critical chance debuff. As a result, the team would have to bring along a separate defensive support for longer battles.

Long Cooldown on Star Generation

Marie’s primary means of critical star generation is tied to her second skill, which comes at a steep 9-turn cooldown. This makes it unlikely for it to be available twice in a single stage unless it’s max leveled, so players should use it more carefully.

Craft Essences which grant additional critical stars per turn are ideal for Marie, especially when she is used in her capacity as a critical support. Combined with her second skill, these Craft Essences turn her into a star-generating machine.

Formal Craft / Projection

With a triple-Arts deck as well as an Arts NP, Marie benefits greatly from these Craft Essences, as her overall damage and NP gain will be increased. However, these are not as significant for her as they are for other Arts-oriented Servants due to her low damage potential.

Prisma Cosmos

This Craft Essence should be used in situations where Marie needs to apply her critical damage buff multiple times, or when fighting enemies with high critical chance. Compared to the Arts-buffing category, this Craft Essence grants her more NP charge, but doesn’t increase her Arts cards’ damage.

Flexible

As most of Marie’s usefulness lies in her skills as opposed to her normal cards, she is one of the few Servants who can work with essentially any Craft Essence.

While the recommendation listed here aims to maximize Marie’s critical support role, there are other options for more general usage, such as leveling Beautiful Princess (Sea) before Sparkling Sunflower for more staying power.

Beach Flower A+: Although the Male-exclusive star generation buff may seem somewhat situational, this skill’s true value lies in that it provides Marie’s team with a constant damage increase. Thanks to this skill’s low cooldown, its sheer reliability brings it above Sparkling Sunflower, which has a long cooldown.

Sparkling Sunflower A: While of a longer cooldown and hence less readily available than Beach Flower, the amount of healing and stars generated by this skill benefits from being leveled. At max level, this skill generates 10 stars per turn, and if Marie is equipped with star-generating Craft Essences, she will be able to cover a large part of the team’s critical star needs. Another thing to be noted is that the cooldown reductions gained from leveling it allows the skill to potentially be used more than once in a stage.

Beautiful Princess (Sea) A: The 3-hit Invincibility provided by this skill is its strongest effect. However, its effectiveness doesn’t increase as the skill is leveled up, and its secondary effect of debuff resistance increase is rather situational. This means that it benefits solely from the cooldown reductions, making it a relatively worse investment compared to the other two skills.